tea towels for the girls

Today I am linking up with Beyond Beyond (the second year of Beyond Layers) for our latest assignment. Kim is continuing to help us hone our photography skills - in-camera and post-processing, including Lightroom and Photoshop. This week we played with focus points: emphasizing different parts of the same scene, depending on what you want the viewer to - well, um - focus on. 

I was already planning to do something with the wonderful old baking powder tin we found in my mother's laundry room, inside the wonderful old pantry I "rescued" from obscurity there (more on the pantry in another post). What a delight it was to discover that the tin was full of dried fennel seed, a staple in any Italian kitchen, used mainly for seasoning sausage. They say that the sense of smell is one of the strongest memory triggers. The spicy-sweet anisette aroma is simply magical, transporting me back almost 50 years to my grandparents' little house in north Denver.

I quickly selected a snapshot of "Dudie" as we kids called her, taken in 1945, an amazingly timeless image of her, as that is pretty much how I remembered her over 20 years later, before she passed away suddenly in 1968, when I was just a little girl. Then I recalled a set of embroidered tea towels that she had made many years ago...her hand-written note says it all: Tea Towels for the Girls. "The Girls" were my two sisters and I, who along with our brother were her only grandchildren.

I think Dudie would have approved of this little "portrait" of her, don't you?

xoxo

Cindy